Gorsuch, who recently traveled to Washington, D.C., was put on Trump’s short list for the appointment after he met with the then-president-elect after the 2016 election.

Speaking on background, an administration source instrumental to the SCOTUS selection process tells IJR, “Yes. It is Gorsuch. 100 percent. The Hardiman thing is a head fake.” Thomas Hardiman is the other judge Trump was considering for the vacancy, who is also in Washington, D.C.

A second source within the Trump administration confirmed IJR’s reporting.

A head fake? Good god.

Now, if I were a high-ranking administration source eager to pour my leaking heart out about who the President of the United States was going to nominate to the Supreme Court, Benny Johnson is not the reporter I would choose. This 2015 Washington Post story calls him a “disgraced journalist[]” and describes how he lost his job as “viral politics editor” at Buzzfeed when he was “exposed as a plagiarist.”